The IBM PCjr Exhibition Starter Kit

I had a blast at this year’s VCFMW. If you peruse my event photos, you’ll notice a PCjr setup in several pictures, both with and without people using them. This was my display, which I pimped with an hour-long presentation about the history, hacking, and homebrew state of the PCjr. I stood up three systems: A starter (stock) system, an expanded system, and a hobbyist/homebrew system. All had games and books and software, with original boxes and manuals. I also laid out some cartridge games so people could see what those were like, and also some uncommon sidecars including a speech adapter and cluster adapter. Finally, each monitor had a sign on top of it that encouraged people to TRY ME! and listed things they could do with each system.

All in all, I was pretty happy with it — and some others were too, based on the attention it got. Some highlights:

Dads and sons playing Dr. J and Larry Bird go One-on-One against each other

A Lode Runner expert playing for over an hour through level 32 and 192,000 points until she had to leave

A couple of friends completing King’s Quest (using an iphone to download maps and hints)

Preparation

I copied some software to diskettes (that I wouldn’t care if someone walked away with them) to demonstrate the starter and expanded setups:

Super Boulderdash

Jumpman

Dr. J and Larry Bird go One on One

Music Construction Set

Pinball Construction Set

Flight Simulator v2.12 (v2.13 has a bug if you try to use expanded memory)

Touchdown Football

King’s Quest (original PCjr booter)

These game choices were carefully considered and deliberate:

All of these were bootable disks that didn’t require any DOS — just insert the disk and turn on the system.

They all have support for PCjr graphics, sound, or both (Touchdown Football even talks!).

They support gameplay through joysticks which means there is no learning curve in figuring out the keyboard commands

I felt they showed off the “best intentions” of the PCjr while keeping user learning/confusion to a minimum.

Materials

To flesh out the display, I added many more materials: PCjr magazines, books, and original boxed PCjr-specific versions of software (Lotus 1-2-3, Wordstar, Typing Tutor III, Andrew Tobias Managing Your Money, others). I wanted users to get a sense of what personal computing was like back in the 1980s and I felt the additional materials helped. On more than one occasion people were flipping through the magazines, either looking for names they knew, or mocking some of the advertisements :-)

Here’s what it all looked like when completed:

I will eventually be putting almost two hours of PCjr materials on youtube in a series of videos, but until then, enjoy the starter kit.